Arch-vile



The arch-vile is an emaciated, peach-skinned humanoid with a grotesque appearance, including stigmata. It has no flesh around its abdomen, revealing some of its ribcage and spinal column. The arch-vile first makes an appearance in Doom II's MAP11: Circle of Death. Its description in the instruction manual is as follows:

"One of the worst of a bad lot. You can't think of enough rotten things to say about him. He's fast, hard to kill, casts spells, and resurrects dead monsters! At least these suckers are rare."

- Doom II instruction manual

Combat characteristics
Upon spotting the player, the arch-vile emits a high-pitched, distorted laugh. When killed, it utters an anguished cry as its body seems to fall apart, collapsing in on itself, leaving a bloody heap of dismembered body parts.

These monsters can take a considerably high amount of damage (700 hit points, the fourth highest in the game), and their attack consists of a unique ability to immolate their enemies in flames by raising their arms up and summoning fire upon the targeted foe, regardless of range (though they will not use their attack from more than 1088 map units away unless hurt). They then hunch over and clasp their hands together, causing the fire to erupt, usually sending the enemy flying into the air, while causing up to 90 points in damage. This attack will always hit the enemy as long as there is a line of sight between the arch-vile and the target by the moment when the explosion happens, and can be avoided by staying out of the its line of sight at that moment, which is usually relatively easy since it takes the arch-vile almost two full seconds to do one attack, from when it first calls the fire to when it actually sends out the blast. The blast occurs near the end of the spell. Moving out of the demon's sight does not cause the arch-vile to stop its attack; it always goes through the full sequence unless it flinches after being hit by a third party.

The arch-vile has the power to resurrect other, lower-level monsters that they come across. They can resurrect all monsters that leave corpses except cyberdemons, spiderdemons, Commander Keens, and other arch-viles. They also cannot resurrect corpses that were placed on map by the level designer. This resurrecting power makes them top priority to kill in battle, to stop them from reviving defeated monsters and forcing the player to spend extra precious ammunition. However, the player does get credit for killing resurrected monsters, so in levels containing an arch-vile the KILLS percentage displayed at the end may exceed 100%.

Arch-viles are the fastest monsters in the game except for charging lost souls, almost 50% quicker than even the cyberdemon. They are also the most resistant monster to pain, which makes canceling their attacks difficult; a point-blank shot with the super shotgun only disrupts their spell 47% of the time.

Arch-viles can be hurt by the blast damage of their own flame attack, so it is possible for an attacking arch-vile to hurt itself or any arch-vile close to its target. However, monsters (including other arch-viles) damaged by an arch-vile's attack will never retaliate because there is an exception in the source code that prevents other monsters from targeting them. This does not stop arch-viles themselves from targeting and damaging other monsters, though. Arch-viles are easy to distract because of their lack of targeting threshold; which means they will always immediately switch target when hit.

An interesting fact is that damage done by arch-vile attacks, unlike damage inflicted by the attacks of all other enemies and the player himself, is not subjected to randomization. It only slightly varies between around 83 to 89 (the exact value depends on how the arch-vile and its target are placed with respect to the blockmap, and the slight variation is not related to Doom's RNG), and in case of blast-immune targets like spider mastermind and cyberdemon they always inflict static 20 points of damage.

Tactical analysis
An arch-vile has the lowest pain chance in the game, so it is not possible to reliably prevent an arch-vile from attacking. This makes it essential to kill them very quickly or take cover. As arch-viles move quickly, the cover may become unavailable after being used once or twice. However, it is needed only for the very short periods when the arch-vile is about to damage the player. A timely BFG blast from a short distance is the only reliable method to kill an arch-vile before it can finish its attack. When using any other weapon, cover is necessary. The plasma rifle will often suppress them from using their attack thanks to its high rate of fire; the super shotgun is similarly useful due to its large number of hitscan shots in one blast. The rocket launcher is also useful at dispatching them, although the player runs a risk of being counterattacked, especially if there are more than one of them at a time. If using the super shotgun, the player can also take a potshot at the arch-vile just after it attacks, as the arch-vile is immobilized briefly after each flame attack.

It is inadvisable to attack an arch-vile while it is engaged in combat with other monsters. If an arch-vile switches its target while it is in the middle of performing an attack, its flames will instantly latch onto the new target without resetting their timer; therefore, if the player shoots an arch-vile while it is almost finished immolating another monster, the flames will move onto the player and explode almost instantly.

There are some interesting engine quirks associated with the arch-vile's attack and abilities, such as their assisting players with jumps and creating non-clipping ghost monsters.

Inspiration and development
The idea and name for the arch-vile came from Sandy Petersen.

Bobby Prince said: "The Archvile is an evil healer. Anyone getting in his way is blasted with fire and disintegrated. This includes other demons. But, after he has wrought his destruction, he then goes around and reanimates all of the demons. Because of this interesting dual personality, I decided to give him a very evil laugh as an active sound. For his death sound, I recorded a young girl saying 'why,' pitch shifted it down and mixed it with other sounds. The Archvile just doesn't understand why anyone would want to kill him as he sees himself as only doing good for his fellow demon." 

Data

 * 1) Assumes that the victim never takes blast damage from an attack on a different target.
 * 2) Cannot be targeted because arch-viles attack other monsters only in retaliation, but may be accidentally hurt by blast damage.
 * 3) Arch-viles can never be arch-vile targets, but may suffer accidental blast damage.

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the arch-vile is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of arch-viles per skill level:

Of the maps covered on the Doom Wiki, the following have the highest numbers of arch-viles in single-player: This data was last verified on June 16, 2022.

Doom RPG
In Doom RPG, the archvile (spelled without a dash in this title) appears as a class of monster. There are three variations, in increasing order of power, identified by color:
 * Infernis (blue)
 * Archvile (gold)
 * Apollyon (red)

The archvile class of monsters are particularly susceptible to axe attacks and also share a similar weakness to the fire extinguisher with the lost soul-class monsters, much the same as in the novelisation of Hell on Earth. They also possess the ability to revive dead monsters; note that this will fail if the player is standing on its target's corpse at the time. When attacking, regardless of the monster's type, it always uses the unmodified sprite of the regular archvile raising its arms and becoming engulfed in flames.